Steven W. Orr writes:
I just bought a new 1T SATA drive to add to the mix, and here's what I'd like to do (but I don't understand how to do it). I want to add the new drive as a third disk so that the system will continue to boot off of sda. I'm current;y running F10 in 32 bit mode. After I add the new drive, it will be seen as sdc, and I will want to install F12 in 64 bit mode on sdc. Q0: Can I tell the install DVD to install on sdc and to leave sda alone?
Yes.
Q1: Is it possible to have multiple bootable devices? And how do I do this?
Not easily. You have to have a second copy of grub installed on a partition on the new drive. Not on the new drive's master boot record, but on the first partition. Then, add an entry on your first grub's menu.lst to chain-load the second copy of grub. I don't recall the actual grub voodoo to do this, have to look it up. Essentially you'll initially boot into your first grub menu to boot your existing Fedora install, then select the grub menu entry to boot the second copy of grub, which would boot your second Fedora install.
I'd be surprised if Anaconda could digest this automatically. What I would do is temporary pull sda and sdb, hook up the new sdc, install Fedora on it, and tell Anaconda, during the install, to put grub on the partition.
Then, I'd plug the original drives in, boot the original Fedora install, then frob its grub menu until I get it to work.
Next, after I'm thrilled to death that sdc is how I want it to be, I want to make a cutover so that sdc will then become the primary boot device. My understanding is that the four SATA plugs I have on my motherboard are defined so that one (currently sda) is considered to be the primary device. Q2: When I do a cutover, do I have to switch the cables on the new sdc and what is now sda? Will the new drive end up being referred as sda and the now current sda become sdc?
Generally, the primary drive that's connected to what's considered the first SATA bus on your motherboard becomes sda.
Q3: Is there a grub command I need to run to make the new drive become the bootable device? Or do I have to then reload from scratch to make it all work?
N/ANow, for this to have any chance of working, you must use partition labels to:
1) Specify the root device when booting the kernel, and2) Specify your partitions (which includes the swap partition, if any) in /etc/fstab
You cannot have direct references to /dev/sdc? in menu.lst or in /etc/fstab, because after you swap out the existing drive, the new drive becomes /dev/sda. I think that current Anaconda uses labels by default, if not you'll have to manually fix it up. Additionally, before the swap, you'll have to replace all refernces to (hd2,x) to (hd0,x) in menu.lst, on the new drive, in order for grub to figure things out. Note that some of this stuff may require manually rerunning /sbin/grub-install.
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